Idées Fortes

Idées Fortes

More Is Less

With the introduction of PointCast, MSNBC, and myriad other instant electronic news services, 1996 turned out to be the best year yet for news junkies. And this is just the beginning. The Internet and telecom deregulation have spawned a news revolution that will make today's flurry of instantaneous news look like a scene from The Flintstones. What's good for Ted Turner and Bill Gates isn't all that great for the rest of us, however. In a world glutted with information, constant updates are not only a diminishing asset, they are becoming a dangerous distraction. Watching could be hazardous to our health.Since the dawn of time, humans have constructed a quilt of community understanding out of new information. In a world of information scarcity, messenger-journalists performed the vital community service of acquiring and transmitting fresh data. Newspapers, wrote Arthur Young in 1793, are "that universal circulation of intelligence, which in England transmits the last vibration of feeling or alarm, with electric sensibility, from one end of the Kingdom to another." This sentiment was echoed by Adolph Ochs when he bought The New York Times in 1896. Its mission, he declared, was to "give the news, all the news … and give it as early, if not earlier, than can be learned through any other reliable medium." Then information came into abundance. Data is now so plentiful that consumers face the curious hazard of information glut. We cannot keep up with the information we produce. In this context, new information becomes more of a diversion than a contribution to society. Today's challenge is to manage the vast quantities of information we already have stored up. News is not, of course, completely irrelevant. But the value of daily updates will pale in comparison to information we already have on hand – how to feed and clothe ourselves, fight pestilence, and govern ourselves using a balance of strict laws and broad liberties. The new challenge is to share this information with each other, to manage it thoughtfully, and to transform it into knowledge inside millions of individual brains. This is not so much fact-hunting as it is data-gardening. The traditional news media haven't come to terms with this fundamental shift, which is why Yahoo!, AltaVista, and other Web libraries are fast becoming primary information sources. Yet old-school journalists maintain a fierce bias against what they call old news. "We've covered that," they snarl. "It's been done." They opt instead for anything that smells new or dramatic – divorces, disgraces, deaths. "My job is not to educate the public," insists TV producer Steve Friedman in a typically myopic declaration of journalistic principle. "My job is to tell the public what's going on." His distinction is critical. Mere telling focuses on the mechanics of transmitting news of the moment, while education assumes a responsibility for making sure that knowledge sticks. Journalists who limit their role to news flashes are absolving themselves of any overarching obligation to the audience. In our new world, reporters must become more like teachers, and we all must learn the skills of the librarian. Information management is the fuel for our thriving civilization. But in the last 50 years, the integrity of our data management has been threatened by a historical first: production is now dramatically outpacing consumption. This leaves us with what Finnish sociologist Jaako Lehtonen calls an "information discrepancy," a permanent processing deficit. "The real issue for future technology," says Eli Noam, the director of Columbia University's Institute for Tele-Information, "does not appear to be production of information, and certainly not transmission, but rather processing. Almost anybody can add information. The difficult question is how to reduce it." If we can't find a way, Noam warns, we may be setting ourselves on a road toward a chaos that not even scientists will enjoy observing. The organization of information, says Noam, is the one major counterforce to entropy. Not being able to effectively manage our information means that we may be beginning to lose control of information and finally succumbing to entropy. In this light, an increasingly news-manic culture is not only less and less attuned to its own needs, but may also be on a track to oblivion. Now that's devolution.

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David Shenk(dshenk@aol.com) writes the "Net Skeptic" column for MSN. His book, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, will be published in April by HarperCollins.

Does Not Compute

By and large, educators still think of computers as inherently mathematical. Most high schools present computing as part of the math-science curriculum. Meanwhile, professionals create programs without even using computer code; users create documents and programs using drag-and-drop icons or pulldown menus. Saying you need to be good at math to use a computer is like saying you need to be an architect to live in a house.A paradigm shift, not money, is the operative need. Teachers need to educate themselves about computers. Computers need to be brought out of math ghettos. Without being introduced to the range of possibilities, students are missing out on what they could be learning. As a result, neither computers nor people can reach their full potential. The compute in computer denotes only how the device works, not how we work with it.

Isabel Walcott, a multimedia entrepreneur, is designing a major Web site for teenage girls (www.smartgirl.com/).

NC: New Centralism?

Will the network computer succeed? "In some Nazi-oriented companies it will succeed very well," says Michael Dertouzos, head of computer science at MIT. Yanking expensive PCs and replacing them with cheap NCs will save companies a lot of money. But the cost to innovation will be high.It's no coincidence that the breakdown in rigid corporate hierarchies and the addition of employee "empowerment" to the management lexicon paralleled the move from mainframes to PCs. With PCs, employees gained more control over their work. And because they could customize the computers, new software that may never have received the approval of MIS managers entered the workplace.All computers can be networked, of course. But the PC is a smart machine. The NC is a dumb terminal. A network of dumb terminals adds up to a dumb organization.

Who cares about Internet privacy; try complete disclosure. Confoundingly, many who argue for a marketplace of ideas and a free-market economy also argue for secrecy, privacy, and NDAs. The exchange of information is one of the best ways to foster progress. Yet thanks to corporate firewalls, many keep things private against their will, out of obligation to another person. That other person often demands privacy to avoid social ridicule if the information got out or – possibly more often – because business would suffer if someone else were to "steal ideas."But if all ideas were shared, there could be no IP theft. And if more people dared to be honest about their behavior, then little could cause social scorn.

Rebecca Eisenberg(rebecca@cyborganic.net) is a freelance writer who lives at www.cyborganic.com/people/rebecca/.

Give Workers a Free Choice

More young Americans believe in UFOs than believe they will receive a Social Security check when they retire. Among other things, this is a terrible indictment of a government program that has run its course.When Otto von Bismarck created pay-as-you-go social security in 1883, he never dreamed that most governments in the Western world would adopt his model – and that a century later all those systems would be heading toward bankruptcy. The absurdity of the pay-as-you-go system is comparable to that found in the works of Franz Kafka, whose days working at a social security institution must have been a source of inspiration. Suffice it to say that all over the world, social security administrators must be having nightmares about biotech breakthroughs like DHEA that may allow more and more people to celebrate their 100th birthday. In a way, these are also nightmares about a sort of metamorphosis, though not into giant insects.The system could survive longer if people had more babies, since younger generations finance the pensions of the old. But the opposite is occurring in all rich countries – including the United States. I come from a distant country, one the Spanish conquerors initially named Finis Terrae (Land's End). But in these days of a global village, I can bring you an idea, a powerful idea, that can save social security by privatizing its provision. We tried this idea in Chile 16 years ago. (See "Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social Security in Chile" at www.socialsecurity.org/.) At age 30, I became minister of labor and social security in Chile and, with a team of young and creative people that I assembled to devise the reform, we did not ask "Why?" but rather, as Bobby Kennedy had urged, "Why not?" Indeed, why not the best social security system for all workers? Not only for the ones with the extra cash to buy private retirement insurance, but also for those who could not afford to save because of onerous taxes. We came up with a simple idea: allow each worker to put their payroll tax into an individual pension savings account (PSA), where they could keep an eye on their money (or, as we say in Spanish, "la plata donde mis ojos la vean"). These funds would be invested in real wealth-producing activities; of course, not all the eggs would be put in the same basket. And so workers would have capital of their own when they retire. The entire system would be managed by private enterprises in a highly competitive market (no barriers to entry, no initial advantages to established banks or financial institutions). The PSAs would be portable so workers could move them to another company.Perhaps the most difficult task was to devise a workable transition to the new system. We set three rules: "Do not hurt your grandmother" (guaranteeing benefits to those already retired); "Give workers a free choice" (offering the option of staying in pay-as-you-go or opting out voluntarily); and "Do not accumulate more debt for your grandchildren" (closing the door of pay-as-you-go for young new entrants). We also devised responsible ways of financing that sunk cost without increasing tax rates.The results? Today 9 out of 10 workers are in the PSA system. They have received an average return rate of 12 percent above inflation during 15 years. The whole issue has been depoliticized and civil society strengthened. The economy, not surprisingly, has also benefited: more savings (Chile has a savings rate of 27 percent of GNP), higher productivity of capital (invested through markets), and more employment since the tax on the use of labor has been eliminated (the unemployment rate is 5.5 percent). Ultimately, higher growth and more opportunities for everyone.Joe Klein – although not anonymously – came to Chile in 1994 to see whether all this was true. Upon his return to the United States, he wrote an article titled "If Chile Can Do It …" for Newsweek. "The Chilean system," he wrote, "is perhaps the first social policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." If my eldest son, born in Boston and carrying an American passport, comes to work here in the future, perhaps he will be able to transfer his pension fund from a Chilean PSA to an American PSA.

José Piñera is president of the Santiago-based International Center for Pension Reform and cochair of the Cato Institute Project on Social Security Privatization in Washington, DC.

In Praise of Inaccuracy

History, like capital, is valued for its liquidity; most cherished myths are freely sculpted truth. For nobility, for nostalgia, for comfort and confirmation, we turn not to a verifiable recording of the past, but to a loose rendering of it. That fuzziness is our heritage, the other merely a record of what happened. Yet the progression from print to photography to video has preserved more and more events from the past, more and more accurately. With digital storage, we may offer posterity our closest effort yet to a point-for-point correspondence between the event experienced and the record examined. Fortunately, people don't observe events carefully, don't confirm facts diligently, and don't remember or repeat information accurately. Analog rumor will still work around digital truth, and we will retain that comfortably slippery sense of reality that grants us possession of history.

Nick O'Donohoe (nicholasod@aol.com) is an author whose fantasy novels include The Magic and The Healing.

Before & After
In one-to-many media (above), the firm (f) transmits a stream of content through a medium to consumers (c). Compare the many-to-many hypermedia environment below.